[WSMDiscuss] Warriors in movement…., Another warrior walks on… : Peter Waterman walks on, June 16 2017

Sun Jun 18 08:39:40 CEST 2017

Extremely sorry to get this news. Peter Waterman was a great inspiration to
two generations of scholars and activists in labour studies, social
movements and global transformation. Almost four decades ago Arvind N Das
had introduced Peter to me in a seminar in Delhi and we came organically
close in politics and theory. Since then we met many times in India and at
the ISS, The Hague. The new questions on labour and global capitalism Peter
had raised will continue to engage scholars and activists for years to come.
Let us rededicate ourselves to the causes he upheld.
Salute in solidarity to Peter Waterman,
Manoranjan Mohanty

On 18 June 2017 at 00:17, JS CACIM <jai.sen at cacim.net> wrote:

> Saturday, June 17, 2017
>
> *Warriors in movement…., **Another warrior walks on…*
>
> I’m writing again with a heavy heart to report that yet another wonderful
> warrior in the struggle for social justice, and a close friend, comrade,
> and compañero of mine, Peter Waterman, walked on last night, June 16 2017,
> in The Hague, The Netherlands :
>
> *Peter Waterman walks on, June 16 2017*
>
> Peter was someone who was widely loved and respected, and others have
> already posted on him; I’m presently in Canada and so got the news a little
> later – and so my apologies in advance for any duplications.
>
> Peter was 81, and lived a full and rich life, and I understand died
> peacefully in his sleep.  He had been suffering serious heart and bone
> marrow problems for some years now, but had – as people on listserves he
> was on, such as Debate and WSMDiscuss know well – continued to post till
> very recently (his last one on WSMDiscuss was, I think, just ten days ago,
> on June 7); but his condition apparently suddenly worsened yesterday, and
> he declined to take more serious treatment such as chemotherapy, and walked
> on in the night.
>
> Here are just a few tributes to him so far; I’m sure that there will be
> many more in the days to come :
>
> As Raphael Hoetmer, a close friend of his both in The Netherlands and in
> Peru, wrote to tell some of us :
>
> I am writing you to let you know, that our dear friend Peter Waterman left
> this live some hours ago in the Dutch night... He had suffered some health
> issues that rapidly worsened the last days... Gina has been with Peter in
> the last weeks, and let us/me know just today that Peter's situation had
> gotten worse just yesterday...
>
> Peter was very important to us, and will be remembered and present,
> through his great sense of humour, intellectual creativity and sharpness,
> and most of all as a very generous, original and humble person...
>
> As Patrick Bond posted on Debate :
>
> Very sad news that our most active e-debater (and who else has been more
> feisty and friendly over the years?!), Peter, died last night, peacefully.
>
>
>     His partner Gina Vargas notified me this morning that Peter was in
> hospital, with heart disease and leukemia, and took morphine for the pain.
> I'm guessing that he was also impatiently surveying the world scene until
> the last hours, typing out critiques and pushing us all harder to be
> simultaneously more rigorous and more radical.
>
>     But if we all let him down by never working quite passionately enough
> for the multi-faceted emancipation he insisted upon, as you see below in
> his last words to us, nevertheless I don't think I've ever met such a
> convivial, witty and charming comrade in the lefty-internationalist scene
> as Peter.
>
> As Laurence Cox also wrote in to tell me this morning :
>
> In case you haven’t already heard:
>
> Peter’s companera Gina Vargas just told me that Peter died last night in
> his sleep, aged 81. He had been having heart problems and issues with bone
> marrow. He had decided not to have further treatment other than
> painkillers. He was still very communicative before going to sleep.
>
> It is a huge loss for all of us.
>
> For my part, I knew Peter from the early 1980s, when I contacted him
> because of his work on labour internationalism, and in a way I treasure the
> fact that after nearly a decade of rich exchange, we then later on fell
> heavily apart, I think in the early nineties.  I treasure this because we
> then also came together again in the early 2000s, through the WSF, and
> among many other things collaborated in the production of *World Social
> Forum : Challenging Empires* (first edition together with Arturo Escobar
> and Anita Anand, 2004; and second edition 2008), and went on to become
> Series Editors for the Challenging Empires series.  I say this because I
> believe that our experience of falling part only deepened our later
> connection, and made it so much stronger – and where I suspect that this
> might well have happened in his relationships with some others, too.  That
> was Peter.
>
> I have so many great memories of him – including having breakfast together
> with him and Gina in Belem in 2009, on January 26, where it slowly dawned
> on all of us that he and I were both celebrating our birthdays on that day,
> with a small matter of just a perfect decade separating us !
>
> One of Peter’s great qualities was his way of words.  One among so many
> other instances of this was the very recent post of his on WSMDiscuss that
> I mention above, where while commiserating the passing of another great
> warrior, François Houtart, and celebrating his life, he also gently,
> politely, but firmly made mention of a very awkward aspect of François’
> life.  In my experience anyway, very few people have this artful quality.
> For Peter, language, and politics, was an art; and indeed life itself was
> an art.  And he lived an artful life like few others.
>
> Thankfully, Peter was among many other things also an indefatigable
> archivist – and so has already posted perhaps all of his work.
> Characteristically, he self-published his autob (as he fondly called it) in
> 2014, *From Coldwar Communism to the Global Emancipatory Movement :
> Itinerary of a Long-Distance Internationalist* (available @
> http://www.into-ebooks.com/download/498/); which I strongly recommend as
> an exhaustive but fun and rewarding read of an extraordinary life in
> extraordinary times. (I also attach a document here that gives the Table of
> Contents.)  And for those interested, to access all his recent work I
> reproduce here his indomitable signature line, in all his posts and emails :
>
> *Click here for Peter's recent writings*
> <https://www.dropbox.com/s/o8s52g2y905rq6w/WatermanGmailSignaturePanel%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20Updated.docx?dl=0>
>
> To end this tribute, I am pasting on here below two bios for him – so that
> you have two somewhat different refractions of this extraordinary
> personality : One, a modified / updated version of the bio that he himself
> prepared for a forthcoming edited volume of mine for which he was
> Contributing Editor (*The Movements of Movements, Part 1 : What Makes Us
> Move ?*. (New Delhi : OpenWord and Oakland, CA : PM Press) and to which
> he also contributed an essay, ‘The Networked Internationalism of Labour’s
> Others’; and another, that Patrick Bond posted this morning on Debate :
>
> The late *Peter Waterman* (1936-2017), after retirement from the
> Institute of Social Studies, The Hague, in 1998, published various
> monographs, (co-)edited compilations and numerous academic and political
> papers – the latter almost all to be found online -, and self-published his
> autobiography (*From Coldwar Communism to the Global Emancipatory
> Movement : Itinerary of a Long-Distance Internationalist*, available @
> http://www.into-ebooks.com/download/498/).  His work was published in
> English (UK, USA, Canada, India), Hindi, Italian, Portuguese, German,
> Spanish, Japanese, and Korean.  He had papers posted on the
> Montevideo-based Choike
> <http://www.choike.org/2009/eng/informes/4620.html> portal and
> compilations on the Finland-based Into
> <http://www.into-ebooks.com/author/waterman_peter/> website, and a blog
> on UnionBook
> <http://www.unionbook.org/profiles/blog/list?user=1xfzxau0we6p5&xg_source=activity>.
> He was currently associated with, amongst others, the Programa Democracia
> y Transformación Global <http://www.democraciaglobal.org/> (Lima), with
> two online journals, Interface : a Journal for and about Social Movements
> <http://www.interfacejournal.net/>, the Global Labour Journal
> <http://digitalcommons.mcmaster.ca/globallabour/>, and with the Indian
> Institute for Critical Action - Centre in Movement (CACIM)
> <http://cacim.net/twiki/tiki-index.php?page=CACIMHome> in New Delhi. Here
> he co-edited books on the World Social Forums.  After retirement he had
> invitations for teaching, lectures, and seminars from universities and/or
> movement-oriented bodies in Peru, South Africa, Sweden, Finland, Hong Kong,
> Germany, South Korea, the US, Ireland, and the UK.
>
>
>
>
> * Peter Waterman* was born into a middle-class London Jewish Communist
> family, his father being at one time general manager of the major UK
> Communist bookstore, his mother the eventual author of two
> semi-autobiographical novels. After much Young Communist activity and a
> one-year course in journalism in London he became the English and Chief
> Sub-Editor of the monthly of the International Union of Students in
> Communist Prague (1955-8). Following compulsory UK military service
> (1959-60) he became a student at the union-identified Ruskin College,
> Oxford (1961-3), and then did a bachelor’s degree at the university itself
> (1964-5). Now with a wife and two small children, he worked as a labour
> educator for the World Federation of Trade Unions, again in Prague
> (1966-9). After the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, 1968, he ‘left both
> the Communist World and the World of Communism’. He did a one-year Master’s
> in West African Studies, Birmingham (1969-70) and first became an academic
> at Ahmadu Bello University in Northern Nigeria (1970-72). From then until
> 1998 he taught at an institute of ‘development studies’, in The Hague,
> first on Third World unions, later on labour and other social movements,
> their internationalisms and on (computer) communications in relation to
> such. He was editor of the Newsletter of International Labour Studies
> through the 1980s, and has been (co-)author of numerous books and articles,
> published in English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Korean, Japanese
> and Dutch. He has played a major role in exchanges on ‘social movement
> unionism’ and the ‘new labour internationalisms’. More recently he has
> written his own autobio and he been involved with DemocraciaGlobal in Peru
> (where his longtime compañera, present wife, the international feminist
> writer/activist Virginia Vargas lives) with the free, online, social
> movement journal, Interface, and has been trying out the new online social
> movements project, Intercoll.
>
>
>
> In tribute to and in memory of a very special person, and friend, and with
> the most profound sympathies to his compañera Gina and to his son Daniel -
>
> JS
>
> att
>
> Peter Waterman, November 2014 - 'From Coldwar Communism to the Global
> Emancipatory Movement - Itinerary of a Long-Distance Internationalist'
> AutoLeaflet x pw191114.docx
>
>
>
> ______________________________
>
> Jai Sen
>
> jai.sen at cacim.net
>
> www.cacim.net / http://www.openword.net.in
>
> Now based in New Delhi, India (+91-98189 11325) and in Ottawa, Canada, on
> unceded Algonquin territory (+1-613-282 2900)
>
> *Recent publications :*
>
> Jai Sen, ed, 2016  – *The Movements of Movements, Part 1 : What Makes Us
> Move ?* (forthcoming in 2017 from New Delhi : OpenWord and Oakland, CA :
> PM Press), *ADVANCE PREFINAL ONLINE MOVEMENT EDITION @ www.cacim.net
> <http://www.cacim.net>*
>
> Jai Sen, ed, 2013 – *The Movements of Movements : Struggles for Other
> Worlds*, Part I*.* Prefinal version of Volume 4 Part I in the *Challenging
> Empires* series. New Delhi : OpenWord.  *Prefinal version 1.0 available
> @ http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/the_movements_of_movements/
> <http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/the_movements_of_movements/>*
>
> *FORTHCOMING PUBLICATIONS  :*
>
> Jai Sen, ed, 2017a – *The Movements of Movements, Part 1 : What Makes Us
> Move ?*.  Volume 4 in the *Challenging Empires* series (New Delhi :
> OpenWord and Oakland, CA : PM Press).  *Available for pre-order at PM
> Press <http://www.pmpress.org/>*
>
> *&*
>
> Jai Sen, ed, 2017b – *The Movements of Movements, Part 2 : Rethinking Our
> Dance*.  Volume 5 in the *Challenging Empires* series (New Delhi :
> OpenWord and Oakland, CA : PM Press)
>
> *CHECK OUT* *CACIM* @ www.cacim.net, *OpenWord* @ http://www.openword.
> net.in, and *OpenSpaceForum* @ www.openspaceforum.net
>
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>
>

-- 

Manoranjan Mohanty
Distinguished Professor, Editor, *Social Change*
*Council for Social Development*
Sangha Rachana, 53 Lodhi Estate
New Delhi-110003                ( www.csdindia.org)
Honorary Fellow, Former Chairperson,
*Institute of Chinese Studies   *  (www.icsin.org)
Formerly Professor of Political Science, *University of Delhi*
*Mobile: 91-9818195252*
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